I love old school video games!From my very first Atari 2600 in 1979 to when my grandpa bought an Intellivision in 1983 for us grandkids to play, I've been a classic video game junkie.

I was born in 1974, and was very young when these revolutionary systems were released.And I have vivid memories of me as a boy in the early 80's playing Raiders of the Lost Ark, Pitfall, Atlantis & Kaboom on the old Atari.I even remember playing that sea adventure game that didn't have a name.Remember that one?It was titled, "Name This Game".My stepbrother Chris & I spent countless hours playing it.

Then, in 1985, a year before I entered Jr. High School, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out and swept me up in a gaming frenzy for years to come and has yet to go away.

I remember getting my first Nintendo before any of the other kids on my block did.I remember about 10 of my friends & I gathered together and sitting Indian Style on the floor of my parent's basement playing Metroid or Castlevania or Gumshoe with the light Blaster...switching off whenever we died in the game.

One of my all time Nintendo favorites was Kid Icarus.I can't even begin to guess how many hours I spent on that game.

You can play a bunch of the old-school console games online at http://www.everyvideogame.com/. Another site for abandoned PC game titles is http://www.the-underdogs.info/. I've downloaded quite a few games from this site, thereby regaining some titles that I had lost over the years (I started out computer gaming on the Apple ][e in college).

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"They tap dance not, neither do they fart." --Greensleeves, on the Fig Men of the Imagination, in "Twice Upon a Time."

I remember waiting around at JC Penny's to play the Atari console. The old one, with "Space Invaders" as the main game. Turned out, mom was not just shopping. She would go and get in line to put another payment on the Atari she put on layway for me. It took her months, but it was sitting out when little Andrew crept into the living room on Christmas day.

One of the reasons those old games were so good, in my mind, is that the people making them concentrated on the mechanics. When you cannot woo players with useless eye candy, you need to make the game challenging to play, but some parts of it easy enough to master so a new player feels they are gaining something.

One of the best RPG games was the original "Pool of Radiance" for the Commodore 64. It was turn based and I like it much better than the new D&D type games. You really could build and control an entire party. I couldn't do that playing some of the newer stuff that is real time.

Hi...My parents got us Pong after we were married a couple of years, still have it. .We got our daughter Nintendo and have been playing for years now. We had Gumshoe also and the hand and arm died after an hour, but it was fun. Hubby and I were up til 3 and 4 in the morning playing 1942. I even made a map for the first Zelda, it was funny, her friends were calling me for advice on that one. We've been buying each new Nintendo and Zelda, Metroid,Prince of Persia and many more shoot em up games as they come out. We're on the search for Wii.

I have a link to a Commodore 64 emulator that's free and has every game for it somewhere - I'll post it when I come across it. I recently downloaded it just to play some old Infocom games. There's an Amiga emulator on the same site but you have to buy the Kickstart as it's still under copyright (although I've been told it's really cheap).